On Thursday’s press conference, the Minister of the Prime Minister’s office János Lázár underlined Hungary needs to urgently “reintroduce detention to migrants”. Unfortunately János mixed facts quite severely in his statement, so we felt we have to help him out a bit. We are not surprised, of course, that the Hungarian government does not know its own asylum legislation, given the speed with which many aspects of it were changed in 2016, and given their total ignorance of international legislation. The core of the detention legislation, however, dates back to 2013, so János should know better. Therefore we wrote him the open letter below.

***Dear János,

You stated that the Hungarian government has to reintroduce the detention of migrants to guarantee security. It is quite clear for us that your statement is a populist reach for voters among the far right, because Hungary has had a detention system in place for the last three years. Consequently, there’s no need to reintroduce it. What you suggested as a new policy is not “detention of migrants” but jailing everybody who applies for asylum. That’s very problematic for many reasons, but as you seem not to be totally aware of the system as it is now, we will begin today by sharing with you some basic facts about detention and reception in Hungary.